Sunday, March 05, 2006

Study and work? Not in my class!

There is something that has been eating me since I've heard it the first time.It happens that in Ben-Gurion university in Beer Sheva, Israel, there are some professors and faculty heads that believe and stated at numerous occasions, that students should not combine working with academic studies, since it likely to hurt students achievements at both.I happen to agree with this statement, and believe that if the student has an option to dedicate all of his time to studies, he should do so, but the university staff went a few steps further.They make active steps in order to prevent students from working, by requiring obligatory attendance at some key courses and scheduling the lectures so, that they occupy as much weekdays as possible.I would be happy to know if they were providing conditions for more students to be able to dedicate their time exclusively for studies, but this simply makes me furious.What with the students that have other obligations that require them to work? What with those gifted ones who can successfully to combine studies with work? And finally, who granted them the right to set what should or shouldn't the students do outside the walls of the university?!

3 comments:

Yeah, I can't stand the moralizing motivation either. I don't think you can do anything about it, though, since they have a right to schedule classes whatever way they wish. For a while, my college has tried to do something similar, scheduling as many classes on Friday as possible, and giving Wednesday as a day off to most students - so they wouldn't get drunk on Friday nights. I think you can pretty much guess the outcome - the students started getting drunk on Tuesday nights. So now they switched back. Though *some* of us still wind up having to take a Friday night class. But that's "our" own problem. In short, moralizing doesn't work.